The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd

“It is a tale too slow for the impatience of our age,” Shepherd writes in 1947 and 58 years later it is an observation which couldn’t feel more true, and is astonishing in the way it reminds us that whatever the era the demand for human progress outstrips our sensation of time. Yet this entirely book is about timelessness, about one woman’s brief, if long by human terms, relationship with a mountain range, the Cairngorms of Scotland. It is a slender book, yet somehow packed with wisdom and beauty. It contains a life, a life lived slow and in harmony with an environment which is hazardous and fulfilling simultaneously.

The book doesn’t follow a linear narrative, but rather meanders in a series of connections: chapters on the plateau, on groups of walkers, on the influence of water, frost and snow. As the words flow, you begin to build up a sense of the mountains, their power and structure, their danger and their beauty, the ways in which they can surprise even the seasoned walker, taking lives in a sudden freeze. That Shepherd has a total respect and love for the mountains is apparent, there is a sense that they are the gift that kept giving through the course of her life and the book is her gift to the rest of us, sharing her experience and her observations.

Not surprisingly the subject of silence, a subject which is becoming a favourite of mine, is one which Shepherd covers in some depth. As she explains here, taken from two separate sections:

“The presence of another person does not detract from, but enhances, the silence, if the other is the right sort of hill companion. The perfect hill companion is the one whose identity is for the time being merged into that of the mountains, as you feel your own to be. Then such speech as arises is part of a common life and cannot be alien.”

“Having disciplined mind and body to quiescence, I must discipline them also to activity. The senses must be used. For the ear, the most vital thing that can be listened to here is silence. To bend the ear to silence is to discover how seldom it is there. Always something moves. When the air is quite still, there is always running water; and up here that is a sound one can hardly lose, though on many stony parts of the plateau one is above the watercourses. But now and then comes an hour when the silence is all but absolute, and listening to it one slips out of time.”

This is something I’ve found myself thinking about a great deal recently: the difference between chatter and conversation, how silence can be more companionable than speech. We fill our lives with sound, but fail to hear anything. Shepherd’s words draw it out so clearly. And there’s a reverence to her language, a joy which is quiet and profound. She describes the mountain so beautifully, from her nights sleeping under the stars to the walks swathed in sudden fog, the changes in perspective, the hidden lochs, the people she encounters, the wildlife. It is a stunningly beautiful book which concludes, perhaps not surprisingly, in something approaching a zen Buddhist philosophy, as she describes here:

“It is therefore when the body is keyed to its highest potential and controlled to a profound harmony deepening into something that resembles trance, that I discover most nearly what it is to be. I have walked out of the body and into the mountain. I am a manifestation of its total life, as is the starry saxifrage or the white-winged ptarmigan.”

What The Living Mountain offers us is a vision of a life lived slowly, the value of coming to know something so intimately and yet still feel you barely know it at all, the importance of our senses and using them, of loving even the inanimate, of not underestimating, of the experience of being and how fleeting it is and yet how wonderful. And this book is indeed wonderful.

Holloway by Robert McFarlane, Stanley Donwood & Dan Richards

A holloway is a sunken path, a deep and shady lane, a landmark that “speak[s] of habit rather than suddenness” explains this brief and poetic book by acclaimed nature writer Robert McFarlane (plus buddies). It is a book which is very much an exploration, a way of being in nature, a memorial to a man – Roger Deakin – with whom McFarlane began this journey. In the beginning the two men set out to find a holloway, to which there is no map, mentioned in a book called Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household – a book, as it happens, that I have also heard mentioned somewhere else very recently, the result of which is has found itself onto my to read list. It is the book that inspired them, their shared love of it, and so they set out with map and tent, penknife, matches and candles and a hipflask each to find this hidden place. Together they enter a church, crest the summit of a half-moon of hills; they enter the dusk of the holloway and camp out in a flower meadow with full and glorious views of the stars.

Then Roger Deakin died, suddenly and unexpectedly. A few years following Deakin’s death McFarlane returned to the holloway, this time in the company of Dan Richards and Stanley Donwood who contributed to this book. They slept in the holloway, pursued by rain and something mysterious they they couldn’t identify but all felt. It is fitting, perhaps, that in the course of this second journey McFarlane should encounter the ‘ghost’ of Deakin, though not in a literal sense as he explains:  

“That long & happy day passed in exploration, tree-climbing, walking, talking, lounging. I had not gone in search of Roger’s shade, but I found him there nonetheless, glimpsed startlingly clearly at the turn of a corner or the edge of a tree-line. Actual memory traces existed in the stumps of the holly saplings we had cut as staffs, our blade-marks still visible in the wood. He knoweth hym by the traces & by his denne and by the soole.”

A further outing ensues, similar to the last in tone, in character and emotion. There is a sense of boys out at play, rediscovering the freedom of the countryside as described here:

“That car. That strap. My bike. This. The tactile reassurance of the close at hand. Sunlight falls and kestrels call to disavow what we’d just seen and been through and, indeed, the clouds seem to have lifted off and melted quite away when we turn and look back.

Stan and I plunge down the brink and speed. The rifled lanes spill past and we grin tight until, turn approaching, brakes applied – and now, and now; no, come on; now – I begin a slow crash into Dorset with its gleaming chalk and plough-turned flint-tipped ruts.”

So, in Holloway, McFarlane shows us both the experience of continuance and renewal: continuance in returning to the holloway, renewal in that each experience was unique whilst bearing the scars, or the ghost, of the previous visit. There is no ending. It is a book not so much about seeking as it is about discovering something about the self, a way of being, an honesty which comes from using your body out there in the world, surrounded by hills and hidden groves. The book is accompanied by strange, pencil-line drawn black and white pictures of the holloway itself, pictures which are at once unnerving and yet also bring to mind the birth canal, all ridged and furred, a place which may be frightening to enter but which brings you out into a new, and exciting world. And there’s a sense that this is what the book is inviting us to do – to enter the world. Before it is too late.

The language echoes the theme; a dense filigree of words that tangle and yet draw your eye down a path. It is beautifully written, and achieves a great deal in its brevity. Each sentence can be read and re-read repeatedly, the words spilling through the mind like water, un-claimable yet etching their way in. Through these words we learn of history, of ghosts, of nature wild and untameable, hidden places and what they reveal about ourselves and others. We touch on the question of loss, so delicately, and it is, perhaps, the absence of reflection of Roger’s death, the way it is so barely mentioned, that makes the loss seem more poignant. The return to the holloway allows McFarlane to discover that “stretches of a path might carry memories of a person just as a person might of a path” and this is a source of comfort: that a path carries the echo of a person means, somehow, that the person is never truly lost, and the holloway itself is the memory of many, the slow returners, the creatures of habit, a path formed by years and repetition, hidden but always discoverable.

Hol weg. Holwy. Holway. Holeway. Holewaye. Hollowy. Holloway.

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

“There’s a gazillion reservations against this book,” the nice man from the library told me as he handed the most beautiful hardback into my slightly sweaty-with-excitement waiting hands. I could believe it. I had waited two months to read this book; two months of fingering it longingly in Waterstones. Two months of putting it back on the shelf with near superhuman resolve. I had heard so many good thing about this book, found myself entranced by the stern, yellow eyes of the hawk illustration on the cover. It fit everything I loved into one neat little package: nature, birds, stunning writing, a personal journey, challenge, life. There was danger in this, I knew. I could be expecting so much that the book could never live up to those expectations, it could only disappoint.

Did it? No, I’m glad to say that didn’t happen at all. In fact this is a book which lived up to all of my expectations, which makes it quite unique.

H is for Hawk is a memoir, written by Helen Macdonald in the wake of her father’s unexpected death. It’s also an account of her decision to train a goshawk (Mabel) and how this interlinks with her grief following her father’s death and the writer, T.H. White, and his own attempts to train a goshawk (Gos) and his written account of those events. It’s a complex piece of interlinking which a poorer writer would struggle with but Macdonald manages to maintain in delicate balance.

It’s a stunningly written book. There are times when the landscape leaps off the page, and you can feel the fear and tension as Macdonald struggles (and doesn’t) with her decision to train a goshawk. An experienced falconer, Macdonald had been put off training goshawks as they’re notoriously difficult, yet something happened after her father’s death that precipitated her on this journey. That she loves the birds is quite apparent, as can be seen from the description here:

“In real life goshawks resemble sparrowhawks the way leopards resemble housecats. Bigger, yes. But bulkier, bloodier, deadlier, scarier and much, much harder to see. Birds of deep woodland, not gardens, they’re the birdwatchers’ dark grail. You might spend a week in a forest full of gosses and never see one, just traces of their presence. A sudden hush, followed by the calls of terrified woodland birds, and a sense of something moving just beyond vision. Perhaps you’ll find a half-eaten pigeon sprawled in a burst of white feathers on the forest floor. Or you might be lucky: walking in a foggy ride at dawn you’ll turn your head and catch a split-second glimpse of a bird hurtling past and away, huge taloned feet held loosely clenched, eyes set on a distant target. A split second that stamps the image indelibly on your brain and leaves you hungry for more. Looking for goshawks is like looking for grace: it comes, but not often and you don’t get to say when or how.”

Yet despite this love, at times she regretted following the path of the goshawk. This becomes particularly apparent as she sinks into depression, using the hawk as a way of hiding from her life and her responsibilities. She desires to disappear, to become the hawk in all its bloodied majesty, wild and untouchable by human society. She describes her descent into hawk-fuelled madness here:

“Nothing was wrong with the hawk. She wasn’t sick. She was a baby. She fell asleep because that’s what babies do. I wasn’t sick either. But I was orphaned and desperately suggestible, and I didn’t know what was happening to me. For years I’d scoffed at White’s notion of hawk-training as a rite of passage. Overblown, I’d thought. Loopy. Because it wasn’t like that. I knew it wasn’t. I’d flown scores of hawks, and every step of their training was familiar to me. But whilst the steps were familiar, the person taking them was not. I was in ruins. Some deep part of me was trying to rebuild itself, and its model was right there on my fist. The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life.”

As Macdonald chronicles her own passage through Mabel’s training, so she also critiques White’s journey, commenting on his failures and extrapolating from his stories the truth that underpinned his life. At her trade Macdonald is an historian and she shows her skill here in unpicking T.H. White the man from his stories and, perhaps most importantly, from the bones of his memoir The Goshawk in which he describes the terrible efforts, misguided and in some ways quite cruel, to train his own goshawk. What motivated the man, Macdonald seeks to uncover. As she describes here:

“Feral. He wanted to be free. He wanted to be ferocious. He wanted to be fey, a fairy, ferox. All those elements of himself he’d pushed away, his sexuality, his desire for cruelty, for mastery: all these were suddenly there in the figure of the hawk.”

It’s a convincing story, perhaps more so because it is wrapped up in Macdonald’s examination of her own behaviour, the way she projected her desires through her hawk, through the training of the hawk, how she used it to disguise the terrible state she was in, that she wasn’t coping in the wake of her father’s death. Her love of her father really bleeds through the pages, you can feel her sadness, her loneliness, the loss of identity that spawns from the sudden exit of someone so pivotal in her life. It will be a familiar story to many, but the way she deals with it is not. It is a story of love and loss, one which plays out in the training of the hawk, Mabel, who it must be mentioned is such a pivotal part of the story, and for whom Macdonald feels such love that she leaps from the page in stunning technicolour:

“The feathers down her front are the colour of sunned newsprint, of tea-stained paper, and each is marked darkly towards its tip with a leaf-bladed spearhead, so from her throat to her feet she is patterned with a shower of falling raindrops. Her wings are the colour of stained oak, their covert feathers edged in palest teak, barred flight-feathers folded quietly beneath. And there’s a strange grey tint to her that is felt, rather than seen, a kind of silvery light like a rainy sky reflected from the surface of a river. She looks new. Looks as if the world cannot touch her. As if everything that exists and is observed rolls off like drops of water from her oiled and close-packed feathers. And the more I sit with her, the more I marvel at how reptilian she is. The lucency of her pale, round eyes. The waxy yellow skin about her Bakelite-black beak, The way she snakes her small head from side to side to focus on distant objects. Half the time she seems as alien as a snake, a think hammered of metal and scales and glass. But then I see ineffably birdlike things about her, familiar qualities that turn her into something loveable and close.”

It is a stunning book. At first I thought it was so-so and then I realised that I’d swallowed 150 pages and barely noticed and I didn’t want to put the book down at all. H is for Hawk is everything that Cheryl Strayed’s Wild is not. It is honest and outwardly focused. It is a journey in which you see the protagonist, Macdonald, suffer trials and grow. It is not mawkish or self-pitying; there is anger but it is directed, diverted, channelled, so that it becomes something wonderful. It is a story as much about the hawk, Mabel, as much about Macdonald’s father who was a great photographer, as much about T.H. White and his flaws and trials. It is about England and the spectre of war, the terrible abuses heaped upon a child (White) and the terrible ways in which he tried to find comfort and love where none could be found. It is stunningly written, heart-stirring and wonderful. A deserving prize-winner and a book I would be honoured to have sitting on my shelves, a book to return to over again.

H is for Hawk receives a wild 10 out of 10 Biis. 

Wild by Cheryl Strayed

“At which point, at long last, there was the actual doing it, quickly followed by the grim realisation of what it meant to do it, followed by the decision to quit doing it because it was absurd and pointless and ridiculously difficult and far more than I expected doing it would be and I was profoundly unprepared to do it.”

That’s how I felt by page 50 of Wild by Cheryl Strayed.

Could I continue? Was there any point? Couldn’t I be humping a sexy man, any man, instead? Because I was young, I was hot, my mother had died four years ago and I still hadn’t gotten over it. I was a girl of extremes, who leaps into things without thinking. And guess what? I’m hiking the PCT (that’s the Pacific Crest Trail) and I’m young and I’m hot and all the men want me and I love the way that makes me feel and I’m hiking the PCT. I’m hiking the PCT, you know? I’m hiking the PCT and my Mum died. In case you forgot, I’m hiking the PCT. Just thought I’d mention it.

Now you don’t need to read Wild by Cheryl Strayed.

By page 50 I had an idea that I was going to dislike this book quite intensely, and if I hadn’t been on holiday and I hadn’t been in a perverse frame of mind I’d have probably chucked it onto the ‘to give away’ heap and left it there. But I was on holiday and I was in a perverse frame of mind so I continued. This was not a book for me. I love nature books, I love books about travel, but despite the description this book was neither of those things. The PCT, the Pacific Crest Trail a 2,663m trail running along the West coast of the USA, is merely a backdrop for the story of Cheryl Strayed, a pinion around which she spins out this tale of intense self-absorption. The story follows 26 year old Cheryl who, four years after the death of her mother and disintegration of her family, decides to hike the PCT. It’s not clear why she decides to hike it, but it is clear she has no idea what she’s doing. Consequently she bumbles along the trail, slapstick-style, tripping from disaster to disaster – the loss of her boot, close encounters with dodgy men and bears, the loss of toenails, layers of skin, endless hunger and poverty. It has everything which should add up to an inspiring, life affirming story. Yet somehow it just seems to fall short.

I think the problem is that whilst what she attempted (and achieved, I should add) was extremely admirable, and the place she had come from and the person she became at the end of the story was seemingly a positive arc, very little of this actually came across in the writing. Instead we encounter a young, highly self-absorbed woman who is attracted to extremes: the destruction of her marriage through infidelity, encounters with heroin, meaningless and endless (it seems) sex with men she barely knew, directionless and obsessed with the death of her mother. The trip from the person she ‘was’ to the person she ‘became’ on the PCT isn’t really that much different. Again the decision was rash and unplanned, the goal extreme and dangerous. Perhaps the story should be titled ‘Lucky’ rather than ‘Wild’ (though I think Wild may be an accurate title) as it was luck more so than judgement which allowed Strayed to successfully complete her goal. Luck, and a lot of help from people around her which she does (in part at least) acknowledge. In the course of her journey we learn little about the PCT, little about the towns she visits or the people she encounters, except how they relate to her. This is, perhaps, honest, but in a nature/travel diary it becomes tedious very quickly. There are only so many times you can hear about the state of her feet before it becomes a line (or a paragraph) to skip over.

Perhaps that is my greatest criticism of this book: that whilst the potential and scope of the subject matter is great, it becomes, very quickly, highly repetitive and tedious. That Strayed discovered she could endure, that she could persevere despite difficulties, is a highly admirable thing. That I had to feel the retelling of the story an endurance, not so much. Certain themes repeat themselves endlessly: her mother’s illness and death (and her reaction to it), her dabbling with drugs, her self-destructive cycle (which didn’t seem to have ended on the PCT), that she was hiking the PCT, her injuries, how tiring it was, Snapple lemonade, hunger, sex, men and how she looked. Against a backdrop of the intensely beautiful and soulful California wilderness, I had an expectation that we would encounter more than that. What a shame that considering the journey she had taken, she failed to exit the orbit of herself.

The writing itself also became repetitive and irritating. For example, Strayed has a practice of drawing out points by putting them in a sentence by themselves.

Kind of like this.

Especially at the end of chapters, or where a point of special significance is made. However, after 300 pages of

Highly important points

It’s a bit wearing. Especially as the points were not particularly noteworthy. I also nearly threw the book at the back of the head of the person sitting in front of me on the plane home as she railed against her mother’s death, blaming her mother and stacking up the points in which her mother failed her including (I jest not) saying it was okay to call her by her actual name. If this is the extent to which her mother had failed, I’d say she’d done a pretty fantastic job. Again, it is the self-centredness that really grates my nerves. Perhaps it is a cultural thing, but the good old British stiff-upper-lip would never permit that kind of pathetic self-pity. Snooty condescension, however, is quite permissible.   

Perhaps this is the crux of the problem; perhaps the book was simply culturally wrong for me. I found myself irritated in the extreme with her complaints, her irresponsibility, her failure to observe what was outside of herself, her endless references to her looks and her terrible upbringing (no worse than most experience), the disintegration of her family, her excuses for her behaviour. I didn’t see how the woman at the end of the book was any different to the one at the beginning; it didn’t seem to me that she’d learned anything or changed or developed in any way. Perhaps that is an unfair assessment, but it was my reaction all the same. Given the potential of the story, what she’d achieved, the telling of it fell completely short for me.

It is not a book completely without merit. If you are interested in journeys of self discovery then you may find something worthy in this story. Strayed may have been irritating to me, but she was honest and I think there is a bravery in telling her story the way she did. I suspect that she got more from the PCT than is conveyed in the story, and perhaps that is the real failure of this book.

Wild receives an irritated 4 out of 10 Biis.